Thoughts on Storage in the Enterprise

Enterprise storage as we know it is dead. SAN and NAS devices have had their day, but that day is done, and I will be the first one to dance on their graves. I am done with these behemoth monolithic devices. HP, NetApp, Hitachi, EMC it doesn't matter, they all share a simple design principle: Put a ton of disks behind a couple servers. This principle perhaps isn't dangerous on it's own, but mix in misplaced CYA with the storage sales engine and you're left with chaos.

We pay 3-4x what a disk should cost. We then take all our corporate data and put it on these devices. We in-turn leverage all kinds of silly feature that shouldn't be done on a storage target and tie business processes to it. Short and curlies anyone?

In addition to the aforementioned reasons, another main cause of our pain is most well supported storage protocols suck at scaling. There have been some recent cool ideas to band-aid the shortcomings, ie Coho Data will use the network (SDN) to make your storage devices look like one target to the upstream NFS client, but ultimately I don't think this is end game.

Prediction: The future of enterprise storage is clustered file systems like Ceph, with the novel concept being: Push data placement rules all the way to the client.

But wait, there is more!
http://karan-mj.blogspot.ca/2014/01/how-data-is-stored-in-ceph-cluster.html
http://www.anchor.com.au/blog/2012/09/a-crash-course-in-ceph/

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